What is it with all this Platform and Semantic Web stuff?
This is the elephant in the room type question that I can often feel not being asked by folks in the library community who know Talis’ history and activities over many years.
At first glance, taking an excursion around the Platform areas of www.talis.com, or reading the posts on our sister blog Nodalities, or listening to the many excellent podcasts hosted by Paul Miller that are published there, you could be forgiven for wondering exactly that.
In the presentation I gave at the Talis Insight Conference, in November I addressed this question - placing the library technology world in context against the background of the waves of technology in the wider world of the web. Take a look maybe it will help in the understanding of the future benefits that this work will bring in to the library technology sphere.
So what are some of principles behind his Semantic Web based Platform? Questions that Microsoft Evangelist Jon Udell probed, when he interviewed me for his Interviews with Innovators series on IT Conversations. Worth a listen also, as he inquires what we are up to.
Yes, but what practical uses will Semantic Web technologies be in the library world? There are many, but to pick just one. By evolving cataloging practices to embrace RDF (a way of semantically describing data), some of the unfulfilled ambitions of cataloguers, in the area of simply linking together authors and their works, could be realised.
Three of my colleagues (Rob Styles, Danny Ayers, and Nadeem Shabir) have published a paper Semantic Marc, MARC21 and the Semantic Web [pdf] on Rob’s blog. This paper takes you through the process of translating MARC21 records directly in to RDF, then building on that basic RDF representation in to a more readable form and then on in to realising the ambitions of things like FRBR. A very readable and enlightening paper, well worth a read.
So, hopefully having browsed through that lot you will have a better idea why a library company with a nearly 40 year long heritage is actively engaging with this Platform and Semantic Web stuff - because it will help build better library services.
April 7th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
[…] In speaking yesterday, I built upon some of the ideas that my colleague, Richard Wallis, shared in his Talis Insight presentation last November. […]